Commentary on Zhou and Fabian (2021)

This is a commentary on Zhou and Fabian's article, "Velocity and Virtuosity: An Empirical Investigation of Basic Tempo in Contemporary Performances of Two Large-scale Works of Chopin and Liszt"

Commentary on Zhou and Fabian (2021)

This is a commentary on Zhou and Fabian's article, "Velocity and Virtuosity: An Empirical Investigation of Basic Tempo in Contemporary Performances of Two Large-scale Works of Chopin and Liszt"

Gallic acid improves cognitive, hippocampal long-term potentiation deficits and brain damage induced by chronic cerebral hypoperfusion in rats

Cerebral Hypoperfusion Ischemia (CHI) has important role in neuronal damage and behavioral deficits, including memory and Long-term Potentiation (LTP) impairment. Protective effects of Gallic Acid (GA) on memory, hippocampus LTP and cell viability were examined in permanent bilateral common carotid artery occlusion in rats. Animals were divided into 9 groups: Control (Cont); sham operated (Sho); Cerebral Hypoperfusion Ischemia (CHI); CHI received normal saline (CHI +Veh); CHI treated with different doses gallic acid (50,100, 200 mg kg-1 for 5 days before and 5 days after CHI induction, orally); CHI treated with phenytoin (50 mg kg-1, ip) (CHI+Phe); and sham operated received 100 mg kg-1, orally (Sho+GAl 00). CHI was induced by bilateral common carotid artery occlusion (2VO). Behavioral, electrophysiological and histological evaluations were performed. Data were analyzed by one-way and repeated measures ANOVA followed by tukey's post-hoc test. GA improved passive avoidance memory, hippocampal LTP and cell viability in hippocampus and cortex of ischemic rats significantly (p<0.01). The results suggest that gallic acid via its antioxidative and free radicals scavenging properties attenuates CHI induced behavioral and electrophysiological deficits and has significant protective effect on brain cell viability. Dose of 100 mg kg-1 GA has affected the ischemic but not intact rats and its effect was more potent significantly than phenytoin, a routine drug for ischemic subjects. © 2014 Asian Network for Scientific Information

Pomegranate inhibits neuroinflammation and amyloidogenesis in IL-1β stimulated SK-N-SH cells

Purpose: Pomegranate fruit, Punica granatum L. (Punicaceae) and its constituents have been shown to inhibit inflammation. In this study we aimed to assess the effects of freeze-dried pomegranate (PWE) on PGE2 production in IL-1β stimulated SK-N-SH cells. Methods: An enzyme immuno assay (EIA) was used to measure prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) production from supernatants of IL-1β stimulated SK-N-SH cells. Expression of COX-2, phospho-IκB and phospho-IKK proteins were evaluated, while NF-κB reporter gene assay was carried out in TNFα-stimulated HEK293 cells to determine the effect of PWE on NF-κB transactivation. Levels of BACE-1 and Aβ in SK-N-SH cells stimulated with IL-1β were measured with an in cell ELISA. Results: PWE (25-200 µg/ml) dose dependently reduced COX-2 dependent PGE2 production in SK-N-SH cells stimulated with IL-1β. Phosphorylation of IκB and IKK were significantly (p<0.001) inhibited by PWE (50- 200 µg/ml). Our studies also show that PWE (50-200 µg/ml) significantly (p<0.01) inhibited NF-κB transactivation in TNFα-stimulated HEK293 cells. Furthermore PWE inhibited BACE-1 and Aβ expression in SK-N-SH cells treated with IL-1β. Conclusions: Taken together, our study demonstrates that pomegranate inhibits inflammation, as well as amyloidogenesis in IL-1β-stimulated SK-N-SH cells. We propose that pomegranate is a potential nutritional strategy in slowing the progression of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease

Sensitivity to musical emotion is influenced by tonal structure in congenital amusia

Emotional communication in music depends on multiple attributes including psychoacoustic features and tonal system information, the latter of which is unique to music. The present study investigated whether congenital amusia, a lifelong disorder of musical processing, impacts sensitivity to musical emotion elicited by timbre and tonal system information. Twenty-six amusics and 26 matched controls made tension judgments on Western (familiar) and Indian (unfamiliar) melodies played on piano and sitar. Like controls, amusics used timbre cues to judge musical tension in Western and Indian melodies. While controls assigned significantly lower tension ratings to Western melodies compared to Indian melodies, thus showing a tonal familiarity effect on tension ratings, amusics provided comparable tension ratings for Western and Indian melodies on both timbres. Furthermore, amusics rated Western melodies as more tense compared to controls, as they relied less on tonality cues than controls in rating tension for Western melodies. The implications of these findings in terms of emotional responses to music are discussed

Intrathoracic migration of preoperative breast localization wire: a rare case report

Objective: Preoperative needle localization under ultrasound or stereotactic guidance is an integral part of breast cancer surgery. Procedure related complications are rare, and migration of the localization wire is extremely rare. Herein, we present a case of wire migration from the breast to the lung apex in a 49-year-old woman, who refused the therapeutic removal of wire for one year after migration. Case presentation: Preoperative wire localization under ultrasound was performed in a patient with a non-palpable breast cancer. The wire could not be found during lumpectomy and it had been proven to be in thoracic cavity in recovery room. The patient refused any intervention for wire removal; accordingly, she underwent external radiation therapy following breast-conserving surgery. The computed tomography (CT) scan confirmed the fixed wire position at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after wire migration. Despite frequent explanations about the possible late complications, she refused wire removal until one year. During this period, she was closely followed-up for the wire position via imaging. Finally, after 12 months, the patient accepted wire removal by video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) which was performed without complication. Conclusions: Although preoperative wire localization for occult breast lesion is effective and safe, rare complications like migration have been reported and need early intervention

Hyperscore: A Graphical Sketchpad for Novice Composers

The Hyperscore graphical computer-assisted composition system for users with limited or no musical training takes freehand drawing as input, letting users literally sketch their pieces

Decoding time for the identification of musical key

This study examines the decoding times at which the brain processes structural information in music and compares them to timescales implicated in recent work on speech. Combining an experimental paradigm based on Ghitza and Greenberg (Phonetica, 66(1-2), 113-126, 2009) for speech with the approach of Farbood et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(4), 911-918, 2013) for musical key-finding, listeners were asked to judge the key of short melodic sequences that were presented at a highly a compressed rate with varying durations of silence inserted in a periodic manner in the audio signal. The distorted audio signals comprised signal-silence alternations showing error rate curves that identify peak performance centered around an event rate of 5-7 Hz (143-200 ms interonset interval; 300-420 beats/min), where event rate is defined as the average rate of pitch change. The data support the hypothesis that the perceptual analysis of music entails the processes of parsing the signal into chunks of the appropriate temporal granularity and decoding the signal for recognition. The music-speech comparison points to similarities in how auditory processing builds on the specific temporal structure of the input, and how that structure interacts with the internal temporal dynamics of the neural mechanisms underpinning perception

Evaluating Hierarchical Structure in Music Annotations

Music exhibits structure at multiple scales, ranging from motifs to large-scale functional components. When inferring the structure of a piece, different listeners may attend to different temporal scales, which can result in disagreements when they describe the same piece. In the field of music informatics research (MIR), it is common to use corpora annotated with structural boundaries at different levels. By quantifying disagreements between multiple annotators, previous research has yielded several insights relevant to the study of music cognition. First, annotators tend to agree when structural boundaries are ambiguous. Second, this ambiguity seems to depend on musical features, time scale, and genre. Furthermore, it is possible to tune current annotation evaluation metrics to better align with these perceptual differences. However, previous work has not directly analyzed the effects of hierarchical structure because the existing methods for comparing structural annotations are designed for “flat” descriptions, and do not readily generalize to hierarchical annotations. In this paper, we extend and generalize previous work on the evaluation of hierarchical descriptions of musical structure. We derive an evaluation metric which can compare hierarchical annotations holistically across multiple levels. sing this metric, we investigate inter-annotator agreement on the multilevel annotations of two different music corpora, investigate the influence of acoustic properties on hierarchical annotations, and evaluate existing hierarchical segmentation algorithms against the distribution of inter-annotator agreement